PHLUSH Public Toilet Advocacy Toolkit

Our PHLUSH Public Toilet Advocacy Toolkit helps citizen advocates and city officials to plan for, provide and maintain great public toilets that make communities livable, respect human dignity and promote health and well-being.

The seventeen tools are designed for use by architects, CPTED specialists, public health officials, toilet entrepreneurs, transit authorities, media professionals, and engaged citizens.

This case study illustrates how the lack of a public restroom on a key route can render transit unusable for many riders and what community members can do to fight back. When it opened in late 2016, riders changing buses at an expensive new transit center in Washington State were dismayed to find they...

Living houseless in an urban environment requires personal savvy and logistic skill. Days are often an endless series of searches, lines, and waits: finding the next meal, a safe place to sleep, a public restroom. Here at PHLUSH, we see toilet availability as a human right and advocate for building urban public restrooms that...

This guest blog post is from Joan Kuyek of GottaGo!. The GottaGo! campaign in Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, is advocating for a network of open clean, accessible public toilets and water fountains in key places in the region. Currently, the only public toilets in Ottawa are in recreation centres, libraries and large parks. When the...

This guest blog post is from Atara Jaffe. Sustainability. From mainstream media to blogs, sustainability is not just a buzzword, but is frequently used as a term to embody practices related to survival. Everyone from homeowners to architects are incorporating “sustainability” tactics to slowly transform the way people think and live. While solar panels have...

This guest blog post is from Mary Landwer for World Toilet Day 2013. Please check out our ToiletsUSA page for more info. Follow #ToiletsUSA, #LiftTheLid, and #CelebrateTheToilet. Thanks to a popular children’s book, we understand from an early age that Everybody Poops. What many don’t understand, though, is that not everyone has a toilet to do it...

This week, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Reinvent the Toilet Fair brought together innovators seeking to define the next generation of toilet technologies. After receiving grants over a year ago, university teams, small firms, and non-profit groups set to work, meeting a short deadline and compelling criteria: toilets must remove pathogens, recover energy and...

Isn’t it weirdly cool that we live in a city that celebrates the first flush of every new Portland Loo? Actually, these repeated inaugurals tell us something. A product has met a need. The city has provided a service citizens think is important. People are using the Loo and talking about it. The co-location...

That’s the title of our paper presented at the recent World Toilet Summit in Hainan, China. PHLUSH believes that public toilets should be as much a part of the streetscape as sidewalks and street lamps. But as public restroom advocates all over North America know, it’s an uphill battle. For many public officials...

At PHLUSH we’ve been looking at urine diversion technologies and think no-mix toilets are going to be really important in the future. And we’re keen to get the word out as we consider earthquake preparedness and what to do for emergency household toilets when we can’t flush. So a proposal, picked up by the New York...

Our Mission Through education and advocacy, PHLUSH helps local governments and citizen groups to provide equitable public restroom availability and to prepare for a pipe-breaking seismic event with appropriate ecological toilet systems.